Intersteno Congress Presentation Beijing

Intersteno Congress Presentation – Beijing

Karen Yates, President of NCRA

Lessons Learned

Slide 1 and 2 – Title

Slide 3

The National Court Reporters Association has been promoting excellence among those who capture and convert the spoken word to text since 1899. NCRA has been engaged in formal programs of support and certification of court reporting education programs for more than 20 years. We accomplish this through ethical standards, testing and certification, educational opportunities, communications, government relations, research and analysis, and fiscal responsibility.

Slide 4

NCRA’s Council on Approved Student Education (CASE) was established to put in place a certification process intended to assist institutions by setting a minimum standard for educational programs. CASE oversees existing certified programs as well as the process of institutions seeking certification of their educational programs. CASE members are appointed by NCRA’s President with the advice and consent of the Board of Directors.

We are dedicated to working with all programs to better meet their needs. NCRA provides assistance in marketing their programs, curriculum development, student issues, and instructor training. Following extensive research and analysis performed by NCRA’s Reporter Education Commission and CASE, the Association in the last few years has shifted its focus on reporter education from one of regulation to outreach and guidance.

An accreditation specialist and curriculum developer are on staff to give support and guidance to existing schools and new schools in their development stages.

Some programs may choose to go through the process to become a fully Certified Program, some may not. But hopefully through a closer relationship with NCRA, the court reporting profession is being strengthened.

Slide 5

During that 20-year period, the General Requirements and Minimum Standards (GRMS) educational guidelines, were established to assist institutions in the certification process of the realtime education programs. The GRMS include general administrative requirements and minimum standards regardingthe school’s academic staff, library and research resources, business and professional standards, graduation and awards, catalogue and syllabi requirements, as well as curriculum standards.

The GRMS promote a standard of excellence among the schools. As many as 114 schoolshave been recognized as NCRA-certified programs.

Slide 6

In 2004, the Reporter Education Commission was given the task of reassessing the quality of the nation’s court reporter education system in order to identify ways that this system could be improved. Specifically, the Commission was asked to suggestimprovements to the system to ensure that greater numbers of students with better qualifications apply to, enroll in, and complete their court reporting education.

The Commission focused on strengthening the reporter education system by developing strategies for getting more qualified students into reporter training programs and more qualified reporters, CART providers, and broadcast captioners out into the workforce faster. Recruitment of students, as well as retention of students, was found to be the biggest challenge for schools, as well as a need for quality and consistency in realtime writing standards.

The research findings that formed the basis of the Commission’s recommendations demonstrated that we do have a strong educational system in place. However, there was room for improvement in several areas, as well as several gaps that needed to be filled with new programs and services.

Slide 7

As a result of the research, eight areas became the primary focus:

• Expand NCRA’s role in student recruitment

• Gather successful strategies and practices used by schools

• Build a stronger relationship with school owners and administrators

• Enhance professional development opportunities for educators

• Create a national dictation database

• Improve the current approval process for reporting programs

• Teaching courses online

• PlanFor a Pilot Test of a skill-based Court Reporting Program now called Total Immersion.

Slide 8 Expand NCRA’s role in student recruitment

NCRA has been working with the schools to expand their student recruitment and to put additional, significant resources behind determining how it can best help their recruiting efforts. NCRA created a Career Toolkit that was distributed to all the schools. This CD provides a wealth of information about a career in court reporting.

Among the materials on the CD are:

-Information about what reporters do and why they are needed

-Profiles of working reporters

-Background about how to become a reporter

-The “Spotlight On Court Reporting and Captioning” program that aired on Public Television

-Ideas for advertising materials

-Photos for use in promotional brochures

Slide 9Build a stronger relationship with school owners and administrators

In many ways, school owners and administrators are a forgotten segment of the industry. We changed that by developing a Community of Interest committee focused on their needs, so that NCRA could begin providing the programs and services that would help them be more successful. The owners and administrators working in the Community can determine their highest priority needs, and NCRA will then devote the necessary resources to meet those needs.

Slide 10 Create an exchange of information

There was a clear need for NCRA to provide school owners, administrators, and instructors with a way to share their current practices and approaches and to discuss which are more likely to lead to student success. We can collect, assess, and distribute data in the reporter education system, so that every school can benefit by learning what is truly working somewhere else.

NCRA created an email distribution list for the school owners, administrators and instructors to share their questions, dictation materials, and general practices that help them in working with students. The exchange has been very successful.

NCRA created a national dictation database, with a section accessible only to instructors, so that they will have fresh content for their students. NCRA worked with a business partner to build a national dictation databank and interactive learning system.

NCRA certified schools have come together to exchange dictation material in an effort to enhance the database.

Slide 11 Enhance professional development opportunities for educators

The quality of the educator, whether in terms of teaching ability, empathy for the student, or the desire to serve as a role model along the path to graduation, is absolutely and unequivocally essential to a student’s success. Good educators want to teach to the best of their ability and are at the cutting edge of the profession. The Teacher’s Workshop, offered at each NCRA convention, offers a wide variety of seminars covering topics such as technology, research, speedbuilding and classroom techniques, and future trends in education

NCRA created new and enhanced current instructor education programs that are geared toward the individual teacher. Rather than having all instructors go through a program that only meets some of their requirements, NCRA has offered a variety of training opportunities that allows instructors to make decisions on what training they most need, based on their experience and expertise within the field, all with the goal of ensuring that all instructors are striving toward a recommended standard of excellence. NCRA’s Certified Reporting Instructor (CRI) certification is a widely recognized and highly regarded designation for our nation’s teachers.

Slide 12 Improve the current approval process for reporting programs

NCRA insists on the highest educational standards, but also provides assistance and support to training programs as they strive toward excellence. To that end, NCRA has streamlined the approval process, making it more user-friendly, economical, and flexible.

NCRA ensures that the program approval process maintains the high standards expected of top notch training programs. But it was also our goal to develop a process that was more inclusive, that allowed NCRA to build stronger relationships with all programs, and that demonstrated that NCRA was focused on assisting rather than hindering schools in their efforts to produce qualified reporters.

Slide 13 Distance learning

In 2006, NCRA hired a full time Assistant Director of Education, who could assist the schools with accreditation issues, curriculum development, and general guidance. Many schools have requested her assistance in the area of distance learning, putting courses and sometimes entire training programs online on the Internet. NCRA works with schools to maintain an online program’s high standard, while meeting the unique challenges of online training.

Slide 14 Government investments in realtime education

The United States government has invested in realtime court reporter and captioner education since 2001. NCRA’s Government Relations Department instituted an interview process with the schools requesting assistance and then helped them develop a grassroots effort in order to pursue Congressional funding.

In August 2008, President George Bush signed into law the Higher Education Opportunity Act. Included in this act was NCRA’s Training for Realtime Writers language. This language creates a competitive grant program for schools that train realtime machine shorthand writers. The goal of this act is to increase the number of realtime writers and captioners in order to provide captioning services to the over 30 million Americans who are deaf or hard-of-hearing.

NCRA has obtained almost $14 million in funding for schools over the past seven years. This effort has increased the visibility of the profession and has strengthened NCRA’s relationships with reporter training programs nationwide.

Slide 15 Total Immersion Pilot Project.

The Reporter Education Commission research indicated that because court reporting is a skills-based competency in terms of attaining speed on the stenographic shorthand machine, it might be possible to improve reporter training programs by concentrating more on that skills competency and focusing less on the academic requirements. The goal was to develop a more streamlined program which would allow students to bypass coursework in which they hadalready demonstrated a solid base of knowledge. The goal was both to shorten the program from the average 3.5 years for completion, as well as to reduce the high dropout rate.

A Total Immersion Task Force was created. This committee developed the general outline of the program, the methodology to be used, established the financing and developed their own machine shorthand writing theory for students to learn. In 2009, approximately 200 applications were reviewed for this experimental program; students were given academic testing as well as aptitude screening and a personal interview. The end result was that 15 students began their course of instruction in March. In July, they finished the theory portion of the course and began speedbuilding. Students are required to attend twoclasses per day, five days each week, and to write on their machines for six to eight hours per day.

All of NCRA eagerly awaits the results of this pilot program. We wish these new students the best of luck in their studies, and we hope this project will lead to breakthroughs in methods for teaching machine shorthand.